patients, faithfully trying out these eccentricities. They fasted for
periods long or short; I met one man who went to fifty-five days,
attempting a cure for locomotor ataxia--he was beginning to walk, in
spite of all the dogmas. Later I met a man who weighed nearly three
hundred pounds, who fasted over ninety days, which is the record so far
as I know. This was before suffragettes and hunger strikes, and it was
the accepted idea that a human being would starve to death in three or
four days.
After the fast we went on a thing known as a milk diet, absorbing a
glass of fresh milk every half hour, and sometimes every twenty minutes,
until we had got up to eight quarts a day. The fasters sat around, pale
and feeble in the sunshine, while the milk drinkers swarmed at the dairy
counter, and bloomed and expanded and swapped anecdotes--it was a
laboratory of ideas, and if you had a new one, no matter how queer, you
could find somebody who had tried it, or was ready to try it forthwith.
When you came off the milk diet, you might try some odd combination such
as sour milk and dates. In the big dining room you were served every
sort of vegetarian food. There were dark rumors that the smell of
beefsteaks was coming from Macfadden’s private quarters. I asked him
about it, and he told me he was trying another experiment.
I met him again when he was sixty; still of the same experimental
disposition, he wanted to know what I had learned in twenty years. He
then owned a string of magazines and newspapers, I don’t know how many,
and I would not venture to imagine how many millions they brought him
every year, or the number of his blooming daughters--I think there were
eight in a photograph on his desk. He still had his muscles of steel,
and would take two packs of cards, put them together, and tear them in
half before your eyes. He had been a weakling in his youth, had built up
that powerful frame, and would put on bathing trunks and come out on a
platform and show it to people; very vulgar, of course--no “ethical”
medico would dream of doing it. But it caused great numbers of men and
women to take an interest in their health, and it set up resistance to
those forces of modern civilization that were destroying the body.
My personal experience has been told in a book, _The Fasting Cure_, so I
will merely say that I took a fast of ten or twelve days, and then a
milk diet of three weeks, and achieved a sense of marvelous well-being.
My wife did the same, and we became enthusiasts. I took a second fast of
a week or so, and when I left the place I had gained about twenty
pounds, which I needed. But I did not keep it, for as soon as I left the
sanitarium I started on a new book.
IX
Harry Kemp came to see us in Battle Creek; he was on his way back to
college after a summer’s work on the oreboats of the Great Lakes. He had
a suitcase full of manuscripts, an extra shirt, and a heart bubbling
over with literary excitements. He met Corydon for the first time and
found her interesting; Corydon, for her part, was maternal to a forlorn
poet.
The fates wove their webs, unguessed by any of us. It happened that at
the Kellogg Institution, just down the street, there was a young lady
from the Delta district of Mississippi--she had accompanied her mother
and a cousin who were undergoing treatment. Mary Craig Kimbrough was the
name of the young lady, and one day when she was walking with her
cousin, the cousin remarked, “Would you like to meet an author? There
goes Upton Sinclair with his wife.” Said the haughty young lady, “I
don’t think he would interest me.” But the cousin insisted. “Oh, come
on, I met him the other day, and he’s not so bad as he looks.”
She called the author from across the street, introductions were
exchanged, and we chatted for a few minutes. The propagandist author,
being just then excited over fasting, and having no manners or tact or
taste or anything of that sort, informed an extremely proud young
Southern belle that she was far too thin and needed a fast and a milk
diet. It was the first time in her whole life that a man had ever
addressed her except in the Southern mode of compliment.
I invited her and her cousin and her mother to come over to Macfadden’s
that evening, where I was to give an outdoor talk. They came; and I was
in a jovial mood, telling of the many queer ideas I had tried out in my
search for health. The audience rocked with laughter when I set forth
how, in the course of my first fast, I had walked down a hill from the
institution, and then didn’t have the strength to climb back. No one was
more amused than the young lady from Mississippi.
I remember that we took a walk up and down the piazza of the sanitarium,
while this most sedate and dignified person--then twenty-five years of
age--confided to me that she was troubled in her mind and would
appreciate my advice. She revealed that she found herself unable to
believe what she had been taught about the Bible. This was a source of
great distress to her, and she didn’t know quite what to think of
herself. Had I ever heard of anyone similarly afflicted?
I assured her with all necessary gravity that I had heard of such cases.
This was a relief to her; there were few such persons in the Mississippi
Delta, she declared. The development of her faithlessness had become a
cause of anguish to her family; her mother would assemble the ladies of
all the local churches in her drawing room, and the straying sheep would
be called in and compelled to kneel down with them, while one after
another they petitioned the Deity for the salvation of her soul. When
they had finished, they would look at the fair sheep, and wait to see
the effect of their labors; but so far the medicine had failed.
I assured the young lady that I also was a lost soul, and gave her the
names of an assortment of books--T. H. Huxley’s essays among them. She
duly bought them all, and when she got home, a brother discovered her
reading them and took them away to his law office, where only men could
be corrupted by them. He himself soon gave up his faith.
X
For the winter I took my family to the single-tax colony at Fairhope,
Alabama, on Mobile Bay. Since I could not have a colony of my own, I
would try other people’s. Here were two or three hundred assorted
reformers who had organized their affairs according to the gospel of
Henry George. They were trying to eke out a living from poor soil and
felt certain they were setting an example to the rest of the world. The
climate permitted the outdoor life, and we found a cottage for rent on
the bay front, remote from the village. Dave Howatt was with us again;
having meantime found himself a raw-food wife, he lived apart from us
and came to his secretarial job daily.
I was overworking again; and when my recalcitrant stomach made too much
trouble, I would fast for a day, three days, a week. I was trying the
raw-food diet, and failing as before. I was now a full-fledged physical
culturist, following a Spartan regime. In front of our house ran a long
pier, out to the deep water of the bay. Often the boards of this pier
were covered with frost, very stimulating to the bare feet, and whipped
by icy winds, stimulating to the skin; each morning I made a swim in
this bay a part of my law. (Says Zarathustra: “Canst thou hang thy will
above thee as thy law?”)
Among the assorted philosophies expressed at Fairhope was the cult of
Dr. J. H. Salisbury, meat-diet advocate; I read his book. Let me remind
you again that this was before the days of any real knowledge about
diet. Salisbury was one of the first regular M.D.’s who tried
experiments upon himself and other human beings in order to find out how
particular foods actually affect the human body. He assembled a “poison
squad” of healthy young men, fed them on various diets, and studied the
ailments they developed. By such methods he thought to prove that excess
of carbohydrates was the cause of tuberculosis in humans. His guess was
wrong--yet not so far wrong as it seems. It is my belief that denatured
forms of starch and sugar are the predisposing cause of the disease;
people live on white flour, sugar, and lard, and when the body has
become weakened, the inroads of bacteria begin.
Anyhow, Salisbury would put his “poison squad” on a diet of lean beef,
chopped and lightly cooked, and cure them of their symptoms in a week or
two. He had a phrase by which he described the great health error,
“making a yeastpot of your stomach.” That was what I had been doing, and
now, to the horror of my friend Dave Howatt, I decided to try the
Salisbury system. I remember my emotions, walking up and down in front
of the local butchershop and getting up the courage to enter. To my
relief, I caused no sensation. Apparently the butcher took it quite as a
matter of course that a man should purchase a pound of sirloin.
I had been a practicing vegetarian--and what was worse, a preaching
one--for a matter of three years; and now I was a backslider. My
socialist comrade, Eugene Wood, happened to be spending the winter in
Fairhope, and he wrote a jolly piece about “America’s leading raw-food
advocate who happens just now to be living upon a diet of stewed
beefsteaks.” I had to bow my head, and add crow to my menu!
XI
In Fairhope was the Organic School, invention of Mrs. Marietta Johnson.
It was then a rudimentary affair, conducted in a couple of shacks, but
has since become famous. Our son, David, then eight years old, attended
it. His education had been scattery, with his parents moving from a
winter resort to a summer resort. But he had always had the world’s best
literature and had done the rest for himself. Fairhope he found to his
taste; we had a back porch and a front porch to our isolated cottage,
and he would spread his quilt and pillow on the former, and I would
spread mine on the latter, and sleep outdoors every night on the floor.
I asked if he minded the hard surface, and his reply belongs to the days
of the world’s divine simplicity. “Oh, Papa, it’s fine! I like to wake
up in the night and look at the moon, and listen to the owl, and pee!”
I tried the experiment of fasting while doing my writing; a marvelous
idea, to have no stomach at all to interfere with creative activity! A
comedy sprang full-grown into my brain, and I wrote it in two days and a
half of continuous work--a three-act play, _The Naturewoman_. I record
the feat as a warning to my fellow writers--don’t try it! During a fast
you are living on your nerves and cannot stand the strain of creative
labor. When I finished, I could hardly digest a spoonful of orange
juice.
_The Naturewoman_, like all my plays, had no success. It was published
in the volume _Plays of Protest_ a couple of years later, and had no
sale. Not long thereafter, the students of Smith College, studying drama
under Samuel Eliot, gave it in New York, and these emancipated young
ladies found it charmingly quaint and old-fashioned; they played it in a
vein of gentle farce. Apparently it never occurred to them that the
author might have meant it that way. I have frequently observed that an
advocate of new ideas is not permitted to have a sense of humor; that is
apparently reserved for persons who have no ideas at all. For fifty-six
years I have been ridiculed for a passage in _The Jungle_ that deals
with the moral claims of dying hogs--which passage was intended as
hilarious farce. The New York _Evening Post_ described it as “nauseous
hogwash”--and refused to publish my letter of explanation.
Corydon had come to Fairhope for a while, and then had gone north on
affairs of her own; it had been arranged that she was to get a divorce
from me. I thought that a novel about modern marriage that would show
the possibility of a couple’s agreeing to part, and still remaining
friends, would be interesting and useful. So I began _Love’s
Pilgrimage_. In the spring I came north and took up my residence in
another single-tax colony, at Arden, Delaware, founded and run by Frank
Stephens, a sculptor of Philadelphia; a charming place about twenty
miles from the big city, with many little cabins and bungalows scattered
on the edge of the woods. Frank was glad to have me come--and alas, a
year and a half later he was gladder to have me go! For the Philadelphia
newspapers found me out, and thereafter, in the stories that appeared
about Arden, socialism was more prominent than single tax, and I was
more prominent than the founder. This was my misfortune, not my fault. I
wanted nothing but to be let alone to write my book; but fate and the
editors ruled otherwise.
XII
No bungalows being available in the neighborhood, I rented a lot and
installed my ménage in three tents. Corydon, feeling it not yet
convenient to get her divorce, occupied one of the tents, on a strictly
literary basis. David had a troop of children to run all over the place
with, and I had the book in which I was absorbed. It was turning out to
be longer than I had planned--something that has frequently happened to
my books.
The single-tax utopia, technically known as an enclave, had been founded
by a group of men who were sick of grime, greed and strain, and fled
away to a legend, the Forest of Arden. Some had a few dollars and could
stay all the time; others went up to Philadelphia and were slaves in the
daytime. On Saturday evenings they built a campfire in the woodland
theater, sang songs and recited, and now and then gave _Robin Hood_ or
_Midsummer Night’s Dream_. On holidays they would get up a fancy pageant
and have a dance in the barn at night, and people would actually have a
good time without getting drunk. One anarchist shoemaker was the only
person who drank in Arden, so far as I know, and he has long since gone
the way of drinkers.
Personally, I was never much for dressing up--not after the age of six
or so, when my mother had made me into a baker boy for a fancy-dress
party. But I liked to watch others more free of care; also I liked to
have young fellows who would play tennis in the afternoon. There was
Donald Stephens, son of the founder, and there were several of the
children of Ella Reeve Bloor. One of these, Hal Ware, was my opponent in
the finals of a tournament--I won’t say how it turned out! After the
Russian Revolution, Hal went over in charge of the first American
tractor unit; an odd turn of fate, that a dweller in the Forest of Arden
should carry to the peasants of the steppes the dream of a utopia based
upon machinery! Don Stephens served a year in the Delaware state prison
as a conscientious objector to war, and then helped at the New York end
of the Russian tractor work.
Also there was a young professor of the University of Pennsylvania,
Scott Nearing--a mild liberal, impatient with my socialistic theories.
Did my arguments make any impression on him? I never knew; but in time
he was kicked out of the university, and then he traveled beyond me and
called me the only revolutionist left in the Socialist Party. There was
Will Price, Philadelphia architect, genial and burly--what a glorious
Friar Tuck he made, or was it the Sheriff of Nottingham? No doubt he
sits now in the single taxers’ heaven, engaged in a spirited debate with
William Morris over the former’s theory of a railroad right of way owned
by the public, with anybody allowed to run trains over it! Will had the
misfortune to fall in love with my secretary, and she was in love with
someone else; a mixup that will happen even in utopia.
Corydon was corresponding with the young lady from the Delta district of
Mississippi--who had fasted and gained weight, according to my
recommendation. She had then gone home, taking along a “health crank”
nurse; she had put her father and mother on a fast, and to the horror of
the local doctors, had cured them of “incurable” diseases. Now this Miss
Kimbrough was writing a book, _The Daughter of the Confederacy_, dealing
with the tragic life story of Winnie Davis, daughter of Jefferson Davis.
Winnie had fallen in love with a Yankee, had been forced to renounce
him, and had died of a broken heart. Judge Kimbrough had been Mrs.
Davis’ lawyer, and had fallen heir to the Davis heirlooms and letters.
Mary Craig Kimbrough now wrote that she needed someone to advise her
about the book, and Corydon went south to help her with the manuscript.
David and I put a stove in our tents and prepared to hibernate in the
snowbound Forest of Arden. How many of the so-called necessities men can
dispense with when they have to! Once I was asked to drive a youthful
guest a couple of miles in a car, so that he might find a barber and get
a shave; I was too polite to tell this guest that I had never been
shaved by a barber in my life. In New York I heard another young man of
delicate rearing
[Illustration: _Priscilla Harden Sinclair_]
[Illustration: _Upton Beall Sinclair, Sr._]
[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair at the age of eight_]
[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair at twenty-seven, when he was writing_ The
Jungle]
[Illustration: _Winston Churchill reviews_ The Jungle]
[Illustration: _George Bernard Shaw_ at Ayot-St. Lawrence, about 1913]
[Illustration: _Mary Craig Sinclair and Upton Sinclair in Bermuda,
1913_]
[Illustration: _George Sterling, his wife, Carrie, and Jack London_]
[Illustration: _Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz_]
[Illustration: _Sergei Eisenstein, about 1933_]
[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair during the EPIC campaign, 1934_]
[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair and Harry Hopkins, 1934_]
[Illustration: Flivver King _in Detroit, 1937_]
[Illustration: _Upton Sinclair, about 1960, with autographed picture of
Albert Einstein_]
[Illustration:
MILTON K. BELL
_Upton Sinclair standing before his home in Monrovia, California_]
[Illustration:
DON CRAVENS
_May Hard Sinclair and Upton Sinclair, 1962_]
[Illustration:
DON CRAVENS
_Upton Sinclair with seventy-nine of the books he has written_]
lament the fact that the servant did not always remember to draw the
water for his bath; I was tempted to narrate how I bathed every morning
of that winter in Arden with water in a tin washbasin and a newspaper
spread upon a tent floor. I remember our Christmas turkey, which we hung
up outside in the cold; we cooked it joint by joint, hung by a wire
inside the little round wood stove. Nobody’s turkey ever tasted better.
When Mitchell Kennerley accepted _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and paid me an
advance of twelve hundred and fifty dollars, I decided to build a house
on my single-tax lot at the edge of the Forest of Arden. Frank Stephens
was the builder, and I didn’t hold it against him that, like all other
builders, he underestimated the cost. It came to twenty-six hundred
dollars and kept me scratching for quite a while. I was contributing
articles to _Physical Culture_ at a hundred and fifty dollars a month,
which provided my living.
The little two-story cottage was completed early in the spring of 1911.
It was painted brown on the outside, and stained on the inside. There
was a living room in front with an open fireplace and a chimney that
smoked. High on the wall, a shelf ran all the way round and held most of
my books. In the rear was one small bedroom, and a still smaller
kitchen, plus a bathroom without plumbing. Upstairs was an attic that I
planned some day to make into two rooms. We moved in, feeling most
luxurious after the tents. Next door was a one-room cabin belonging to
Scott Nearing; I rented it for a study, and so had everything of a
material nature that a man of letters could desire.
The Forest of Arden turned green again, and put flower carpets on its
floor, and the tennis court was rolled and marked, and everything was
jolly. The young people were preparing _The Merchant of Venice_, and the
Esperantists of America held a convention in the big barn; I studied
that language for three weeks, and when I went to supper at the inn I
would say, _“Mi desiras lo puddingo”_--at least that is the way I recall
it after fifty years. I was writing a sequel to _Love’s Pilgrimage_,
which I completed but have never published.
Unknown to me, the fates had been weaving a net about my life; and now
they were ready to draw it tight. Corydon wrote that Mary Craig
Kimbrough was coming to New York to talk with a publisher who had read
her life of Winnie Davis, and that she, Corydon, was coming with her.
Also there came a letter from Harry Kemp, saying that he was finishing
at the university, and was then going to “beat” his way east and visit
Arden. George Sterling was on his way from California to New York--he
too was to be tied up in that net!
There was an odd development, which served as a sort of curtain raiser
to the main tragedy. A little discussion club got into a dispute with
George Brown, the anarchist shoemaker. The club members were accustomed
to hold meetings in the outdoor theater, and Brown would come and air
his opinions on the physiology of sex. The women and girls didn’t like
it. They asked him to shut up, but he stood on the elemental right of an
anarchist to say anything anywhere at any time. He broke up several
meetings--until finally the executives of the club went to Wilmington
and swore out a warrant for his arrest for disturbing the peace.
That, of course, brought the newspaper reporters, and put my picture in
the papers again. I had had nothing to do with the discussion club or
with the arrest of Brown, but I lived in Arden and was part of the
scenery. The anarchist was sentenced to five days on the rockpile at the
state prison; he came back boiling with rage and plotting a dire
revenge: he would have all the members of the baseball team arrested for
playing on Sunday, and _they_ would have a turn on the rockpile! He
would add Upton Sinclair, who had been playing tennis on Sunday, and
thus would punish Arden by putting it on the front page of every
newspaper in America. He carried out this scheme, and eleven of us were
summoned to court, and under a long-forgotten statute, dating from 1793,
were sentenced to eighteen hours on the rockpile. This made one of the
funniest newspaper stories ever telegraphed over the world--you may find
the details in _The Brass Check_ if you are curious. What the anarchist
shoemaker did not realize, and what nobody else realized, was that he
was setting the stage and assembling the audience for the notorious
Sinclair-Kemp divorce scandal. The fates were against me.
_8_
_Exile_
I
The story of Corydon and Thyrsis comes now to its painful climax. They
had been married for eleven years, and for the last seven or eight had
realized that they were mismated. They talked much of divorce, and
according to accepted conventions, Corydon was the one to get it. But
the world made divorce difficult and placed handicaps upon a divorced
woman; so Corydon kept hesitating, taking one step forward and two steps
back.
If this story belonged to Thyrsis alone, he would tell it all, on the
theory that the past is past and never returns, and the only use we can
make of blunders is to help others in avoiding them. But the story is
Corydon’s also, and Corydon found herself a new husband and a new life,
and has long since retired from the limelight.
Thyrsis, an unhappily married man, bore among his friends the reputation
of being “puritanical”; a onetime virtue that now ranks as a dangerous
disease. About the bedside of the patient gather the psychoanalysts and
up-to-the-minute “intellectuals”; they take his temperature, or lack of
it, and shake their heads anxiously over his subnormal condition. Jack
London was much worried about Thyrsis and wrote warning letters; but in
the course of time, Jack’s own theories brought him to a situation where
he could not have his wife and another woman at the same time, and so he
voluntarily removed himself from the world. Then Frank Harris took over
the case of Thyrsis and prescribed for the patient a tempestuous love
affair. No man can become a great novelist without one, it seems, nor
can a modern autobiography be worthy of suppression by the police unless
it contains several adulteries per volume.